Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/31/24: State Dep Gaslights On 'Contained' War, Kamala Crumbles During Israel Interview, Israel Raids Hospital Disguised As Doctors, NYT Pulls Daily Podcast Amid Revolt, Cori Bush Investigated, Ilhan Omar Somalia Scandal, Rep Salazar Brags On Funding She Voted Against, E Jean Carroll Offers Maddow Penthouse, Ryan Bodies State Dep On Imran Khan

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss State Dep gaslighting insisting the war in Gaza is contained, Kamala crumbles when pressed on Bibi rejecting two state solution, Israel raids hospital disguised in civilian clothing, NYT pulls The Daily podcast over internal revolt on their Oct 7th reporting, Cori Bush investigated for misuse of funds. Ilhan Omar scandal over Somalia lobbying, Republican Rep Salazar squirms while bragging about funds she voted against, E Jean Carroll offers Maddow a penthouse with the money won from Trump, and Ryan bodies a State Dep Spox on Pakistan's kangaroo conviction of Imran Khan.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning

that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care.

Visit adoptuskids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Stay informed, empowered, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking

of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. All right, good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We have a truly spectacular show today, don't we, Emily? That was as enthusiastic as soccer, but at a lower volume. It's amazing. It's going to be amazing. No, Joe Biden has said that he has decided how he's going to respond to the Iraqi militia attack on U.S. troops that were, for some reason, in Jordan,

reservists, for some reason, in Jordan, reservists for some reason in Jordan, which through our own blunders ended up killing three service members. Biden is now saying he's going to respond. He has not done so as we go to air yet. We're going to talk about the propaganda war that's going on in the U.S. media around both the October 7th atrocities as well as the atrocities that have been carried out since then. What else we got? Yeah, because you and your colleagues

have a really interesting story, stay tuned for this, about what happened inside the New York Times with an episode of The Daily related to the conflict in Israel and Palestine. So I'm excited to get into that. Ryan, the Squad is having a really bad week, and as our resident expert, actually not even our resident expert, the media's resident expert on the squad,

we're going to talk to you about some, you know, maybe blunders or investigations between Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamal Bowman. It's been a hell of a week. Scandals are hitting three of the six members of the squad. And I kind of ginned this up myself so that I could promote my book a little bit longer. Devious. It was pretty clever. I instigated a Department of Justice investigation into Cori Bush.

You filed the complaint. I mistranslated Ilhan Omar's speech before a group of Somali Americans in Minnesota. And I dug up Jamal Bowman's old 9-11 poem. Well, you actually had that already, though, because you read it often. Yeah, but I held it back just so I could push the book a little bit more. If you stay tuned for anything today, Jamal Bowman's 9-11 poem. None of that was true, but those are the scandals that we're going to talk about. Yeah, we're going to get into a clip of Republican Congresswoman Maria Alvaro Salazar, who's from Miami area, getting grilled in an interview.

And this is a clip, it was going pretty viral, but it also speaks to some much broader issues in Washington, D.C. So stay tuned for that as well. And finally, we're going to play a clip of E. Jean Carroll on Rachel Maddow's show. Again, that is super viral for some really, I think, bad reasons. Obviously, Trump got hit with an $83 million payment. So E. Jean Carroll was discussing what she's planning to do with some of the money. And I think, Ryan, her comments might, as you can see on her lawyer's face, we'll get into this, but they might bear, they might have some effect on the case itself because Trump is appealing. And if we have time, we're going to get into both the new sanctions that the State Department

slapped on Venezuela and how those contrast with the lack of sanctions placed on Pakistan, despite the fact that Pakistani secret courts just sentenced Imran Khan for a second time in just as many days. This time, the first sentence was 10 years. Next trumped-up sentence was 14 years. State Department completely fine with that. State Department has a problem when it happens, a vent as well. If we don't have time to get to that in this two-hour show, we'll do something extra and catch it later. Yeah, we have a clip of Ryan actually. Yes, I pressed the State Department on that. Let's start with President

Biden discussing Iran yesterday. Here's this clip from Joe Biden outside the White House. The whole response, the response in the sense that they're supplying the weapons to the people of Libya. We'll have that discussed. I don't think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That's not what I'm looking for. Okay, so we also have a clip from the Pentagon responding to some similar questions. Let's roll A2 here. I wouldn't say that the conflict is spreading in that we've seen over 100 attacks on U.S. forces, unfortunately, over 100 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and, of course, now in Jordan. We don't want to see a widening of this conflict. We don't see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza. But this attack was certainly escalatory in that it killed three service members,

three of our U.S. service members. And as the president has said, we don't see conflict. We don't want to see a widening of a regional war. But we will respond at a time and place of our choosing. It's not spreading when troops literally have died in another country. Well, again, but they've also been launching these attacks since October 17th. And again, we can't discount the fact that these attacks are incredibly dangerous, put our service members at risk, but they have not, up until yesterday, inflicted lethal harm.

They have been predominantly minor injuries and minor damage to infrastructure. It is interesting that we feel like we have to respond by escalating when typically this attack would have been intercepted. And like she said, it would have caused minor damage. We would have knocked the drone out of the sky. Maybe it hits a fence and they have to fix a fence post. But because we screwed up and our defenses presumed that this drone was actually a U.S. drone that had been out, you know, flying around Jordan and who knows where else, that we let it get too close to the base. When it got too close to the base, it killed three soldiers. So it's very interesting that we feel like, yes, they did launch it, but if we had intercepted it like we had intercepted every other one, we would not feel like, yes, they did launch it, but if we had intercepted it like we

had intercepted every other one, we would not feel like we had to attack Iran. Yeah, it's a great point that our own incompetence, and I think this is what's so scary about being fanned out across the Middle East in ways that actually you and Ken Klippensen and the Intercept in general has been, I think, dogged at tracking down and pushing these questions about who's in Yemen? What do you mean we're in Yemen? That's I think what's so dangerous about being in Jordan. That's all made a good point that you know, you know where American troops are not dying Afghanistan.

And people have been saying for years now, leaving troops in Syria, leaving troops all all spread out all over the Middle East is just giving targets to these militias. Say you make a mistake, like in this case, three service members die. And now we're required to go to war over it? Right, right. And so then you have the pressures, you have all of that. And just because of our own incompetence and because we were fanned out across the Middle East in different ways. Now, again, the fault is with the people who are sending drones to us for killing the service members. That doesn't excuse the incompetence at all. And it doesn't excuse us having this strategy that makes us so vulnerable to getting into wars because, like you said, these pressures

can change in an instant. And meanwhile, as Crystal Sager talked about yesterday, the negotiations over some type of resolution to the hostage crisis and the war itself continue, each side rejecting offers and offers and counter offers. Meanwhile, we can put up this next element here. Hamas appears to be regrouping in northern Gaza and a sign of Israel retreating and the war effort going quite poorly on the ground for the IDF. Remember, the State Department won a concession from Israel that United Nations surveyors would be able to go into northern Gaza and just check out the situation and come back with a report on what it would take to get the Palestinian population to be able to go back to their homes. Matt Miller at the State Department yesterday said that that is now on hold because of so many Hamas militants resurfacing in this area.

Israel is saying publicly that Hamas is even policing the area. And this comes after Israel said maybe a dozen different times that they had operational control of northern Gaza, which was in the face of so many analysts saying it's not possible. Like, just simply with the civilian population against you, with the tunnels remaining operational, despite the fact that they're now flooding them again, flooding them with water again, something like 80% of them are still functional. And the Israeli economy is buckling under the weight of all of this, because not only have they now cut off their main source of low wage labor, which is, you know, West Bank

Palestinians and Gazan Palestinians that they're not allowing into the country anymore, but hundreds of thousands of their other, you know, Israeli workers have been called up and are fighting the war. So you've got entire companies that are just basically empty of workers. And you can't run an economy for long under those conditions, especially when tourism, which is a major part of the economy, is also spiraling. Your point about Hamas returning to northern Gaza is such an important one. This is quotes from that Guardian article that we just had up on the screen from Michael Milstein of the Institute for National Security Studies,

which is basically a think tank that's in Israel. It's based in Tel Aviv. He said, Hamas control these areas. There's no chaos or vacuum because it is the workers of Gaza municipality or civil rescue defense forces who are effectively part of Hamas who are enforcing public order. Hamas still exists. Hamas has survived. The IDF version is that in the northern part of Gaza, the basic military structure of Hamas

was broken. That only works with a conventional army, but not for a flexible guerrilla operation like Hamas. We are already seeing individuals as snipers setting booby traps and so on. So many casualties in northern Gaza over the last few months for that goal of eliminating Hamas. A lot of people died in the interest of eliminating Hamas. This is, I mean, beyond tragic to realize that, you know, again, we've been questioning whether that was a possibility when you have, as Michael Milstein puts it, a, quote, flexible guerrilla operation. And I think we're going to be seeing increasingly that the answer to that is what people suspected.

It was not possible to wage that kind of war and, quote, eradicate Hamas. I think, and Sagar has made, I think earlier in this war, Sagar was making some comparisons to Vietnam and the Viet Cong. And I think those are apt in the sense that, and you could also say it in comparison to the American Revolution. Like the idea that the British were going to come over here or the U.S. were going to go over to Vietnam and they would just magically pluck out Sam Adams and John Adams and go find Thomas Paine and kill them and flatten Philadelphia.

Granted, they didn't have drones. They did not. They did not have drones. They had fire and torture and they used it pretty ruthlessly. But because the guerrilla army of the American revolutionaries was part and parcel of the kind of patriotic resistance to Britain, you're not going to just get rid of it. That's not going to happen. In Vietnam, you're not going to identify a list of Viet Cong, you know, capture and kill all of them. And then all of a sudden, you just have a pliant Vietnamese population that is happy to live under whatever American puppet

you put over there. And they would keep putting up, you know, back in during the Vietnam War, they kept putting up the casualty figures. Look, we just killed another, you know, 10,000 Vietnamese. And that would be, and victory is, you know, about to turn a corner. There's light at the end of the tunnel, they kept saying, just to kill a few more. But if the guerrilla army is an organic part of the population, then you're not going to be able to do that. And at the same time,

critics of the Palestinians who say, well, there are no civilians, like President Herzog has said, there are no civilians. They all support Hamas. If that's true, then how are you going to uproot Hamas? If you believe that, then your strategy has to be to completely clear out every Palestinian or your strategy will fail. And I think that for a lot of them, that was their strategy, but now they're running up against the international resistance to just clearing out all the Palestinians.

Yeah, and we're talking about tens of thousands of deaths based on estimates that we have right now, and still Hamas now returning to northern Gaza and apparently operating or reestablishing some of those operations that existed just a few months ago. While they're still waging their military campaign. This isn't even after they've kind of backed off. Right.

Well, I guess, I mean, to some extent. They have backed off, but they haven't ceased fire. Yeah. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

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Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I've never found her. received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her,

and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the deal. We got to set ourselves up. See, retirement is the long game. We got to make moves and make them early.

Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things. Start building your retirement plan at thisispreetirement.org. Brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council. Let's look at Kamala Harris being pressed by Katie Couric on what we have been very clear is perhaps the biggest problem with the United States' involvement in this conflict

in terms of the philosophy, the kind of underlying philosophy that the U.S. is bringing to the conflict. Let's roll this clip. We've been very clear humanitarian aid must flow. From day one, I will tell you, one of my areas of priority included, let's think about the day after, because we must stay focused on an eventual two-state solution. Well, having said that, I want to tell you something which I'm sure you're well aware of, that Bibi Netanyahu, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who recently said he rejected U.S.

calls to scale back Israel's military action in the Gaza Strip or to support a Palestinian state after the war. He even said that Israel, quote, must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River, which includes Gaza. So given those positions, how can you possibly come together? How can the U.S. and Israel come together to solve this? And should aid to Israel be conditional? So I'll start with the principles that we are applying to this discussion, which we've been very clear with the Israeli government about. One, as it relates to the day after, there should be no reoccupation

of Gaza. There should be no changing of the territorial boundaries of Gaza. That the Palestinians are entitled to, in equal measure with Israelis, security and prosperity. Doesn't sound like Bibi Netanyahu agrees with that. We're the United States of America. I'm telling you our position. And we take our role in this discussion very seriously. There may be disagreements. That doesn't mean we're going to change our mind. So should aid, Madam Vice President, be conditional? If the Prime Minister of Israel is stating this, should that aid not come if there's not that kind of flexibility that you're seeking? We are right now in a position of negotiating with Congress to follow through on a commitment we made for aid. And we are taking it one day at a

time in terms of what is happening in the region and how we are addressing the issue. But that's where we are right now. So I don't feel like you really answered my question. I think I did. But do you think it should be conditional? I know you're carrying out- That's not our position right now. Not right now.

It's like that confession was extracted through torture. Yeah. Practically. Just say it. You know Kamala Harris is mad when she's laughing. It was impressive, though, the way that Katie Couric there just doesn't move on and just insists on getting an actual answer out of her. Yeah.

That was, I thought that was impressively done. And, you know, especially after Kamala Harris said, well, I think I've answered your question. It's like, did you? Because I'm not quite sure. Katie Couric committing random acts of journalism. Not quite sure that I heard an answer there. But the substance of it is also so important. There could not be a bigger gap between the two positions of Netanyahu's, which is, you know, Israel ought to control, have security control over everything from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and the American position that Israel should not and that there should be a path toward a two-state solution. Now, Netanyahu's is actually much more grounded in the reality of the fact that there are 750,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and that Israel is pursuing control not just of the Erez crossing but also of the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

They are gunning – they are trying to make that reality the kind of final reality on the ground. Like their vision is much closer to happening than our vision. So in that sense, you know, his posture is in the lead, but for years we've kind of had to pretend that that's not really what he thinks and that there's actually

a major constituency in Israel for a two-state solution if we just continue to say that there is. Yeah, and if you zoom out to 30,000 feet and try to explain the United States' support for this war to people in another time or another era, they would say, oh, so you are aiding Israel and their goals for Gaza, their goals for the territory. I mean, that's the most common sense conclusion. That's what we're doing. Yeah, it's the most common sense conclusion from a nation giving another nation billions of dollars to prosecute a war. But in fact, we're on vastly different pages about why the war is being fought. Or we say we are. Well, yeah. I mean, I think, though, that, I mean, Joe Biden's been a

two-state solution guy for decades. He's, you know, Mr. Two-State Solution. He walks around like Mr. Two-State Solution. And it's just incredibly, I think it's very frightening. We've talked about this a lot. But it's just the fact that this isn't the conversation the media is pushing every single day. And it took Katie Couric like three months to get Kamala Harris to confront that central tension. It's pathetic. Right. And the key thing is, OK, what we say doesn't mean much. What we do is what matters. leaked report in NBC News that Biden is now considering withholding some weapons in order

to put pressure on Israel, which flies in the face of all these people you see saying, well, Biden can't do that. No, of course Biden can do that. But to do what and why? I mean, it's just that's the question that Biden and Kamala Harris absolutely can't answer for Israel to defend itself. OK, so to what again, to what ends? Does that mean that Israel controls the entire area?

Or what are your conditions actually aimed at achieving? Right. The way that people think about it here in the U.S. is that unconditional support for Israel empowers the right wing because it allows the right wing to say, look, we don't have to compromise at all with the Palestinians. We can do the maximalist version of what we want and the U.S. will be behind us the entire time. And that undercuts the Yesh Atid party, Benny Gantz, people who in the past have, not today, but in the past have spoken favorably about a two-state solution. They don't even talk about it anymore. But if the United States came around and said, look, this is the deal. We're cutting off aid tomorrow unless you move forward on an irrevocable path on a two-state solution,

and you cut a deal with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, everybody else, and you just have to do this. That then empowers the political position inside Israel that says, look, we don't have a choice. We have to do this. That moves voters, it moves, and it moves politicians. That's the theory. The theory so far has been held up by reality because our unconditional support for Israel has only moved the Israeli kind of political spectrum, you know, inexorably to the right over the last 30 years. It makes, it's more logically consistent to be a one stater at this point, like Netanyahu, than to be whatever the hell Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are.

Or like a Rashida Tlaib who's like, look, it's not going to happen. Let's just give everyone equal rights and citizenship within the exact same area that Netanyahu just outlined. It's a clear and consistent and like sort of coherent, internally coherent end goal. And that is not what we're getting from this administration whatsoever. We don't have any clear benchmark of what it means to eradicate Hamas and no clear benchmark of what would happen after eradicating Hamas. And yet we are pouring so much money into this conflict that is spilling so much blood. Again, just a scary place to be. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibbillion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders.

I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on hell and gone murder line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the deal. We got to set ourselves up. See, retirement is the long game. We got to make moves and make them early. Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up

and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things. Start building your retirement plan at thisispretirement.org. Brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council. We're getting an absolute pressure cooker situation in the West Bank. Let's roll a video here of this raid of a hospital by Israeli assassins in Jenin. So what you're seeing here is a group of Israeli commandos dressed up in medical garb, some of them dressed as women wearing a job with silencers on their assault weapons, strolling through a hospital. Now they're showing footage of the room where they assassinated three Palestinians. There's a bloodstained pillow where it seems that somebody was executed in their bed.

We were told they were sleeping when they were. And Israel has since said that one of them had a gun on them, but the hospital has said there was no exchange of fire. So the only guns that were fired came from the Israeli commandos there. One of the Western outlets, I think it was the BBC, put assassination in quotes and said that the Palestinians described this as a quote, assassination. In their next paragraph, they mentioned that the commandos used silencers. I think we can take the quotes off of assassination if you sneak up on somebody and assassinate them. Yes, all three of the people who were killed have been claimed by terrorists. Hamas claimed one.

One of them was apparently a spokesman for a Hamas military wing, and the other two were a commander. Right. These are all, like, there doesn't seem to be any question that these are Hamas figures. It also doesn't seem to be any question that they were in a hospital. Which is an assassination. Right. It's just an assassination.

It's an assassination. Israel has security control of the West Bank. Like, they occupy the West Bank. There was nothing stopping them from going in as a police force or even as a military force in actual military gear. And you're even seeing from Israeli politicians and others saying that that would have been just from a tactical propaganda perspective, a savvier way to do it. And you surround them. If they fight back, a gunfight happens and boom. Unfortunately, we had to kill these three militants.

But to go in dressed as kind of nurses and doctors. You can see them in this picture with Ben-Gavir, by the way. We have this next element. Put this next picture up. This is Edmar Ben-Gavir posing with some of the people that were part of this operation that you just saw on the video. Yes, there it is. And they have changed back into some type of commando garb there,

no longer dressed in their kind of medical gear. But yeah, when Israel has been spending so much time, you know, accusing Hamas of embedding itself with civilians, for them to kind of disguise themselves as civilians and go into a hospital that's under their control in the West Bank with, as I said, the West Bank currently at a pressure cooker situation because workers are not allowed to go from the West Bank into Israel. Not only is that hurting the Israeli economy, Israel under Ben-Gavir's, actually under Smotrich's direction, has seized all the funds that belong to the Palestinian Authority to pay unemployment benefits so people are, you know, suffering, you know, financially badly in the West Bank. You're seeing a lot of

Palestinians getting killed in the West Bank beyond this type of situation. So you can only imagine, you know, where this is headed. There doesn't seem to be any effort to try to find any peaceful resolution, any way out of this. It just seems to be an endless ratcheting up of tensions. From the propaganda point of view, I think, you know, Israel can make the case that here you have a very clear cut example of militants being embedded with the civilian population, their soldiers going in and having this precision strike on three guys with no civilian casualties that we know of yet, and no casualties to their own troops. I mean, I think there's a case actually that is sort of flipping what we were just talking about and saying-

If they hadn't dressed up as nurses and doctors, I think they'd be in a little stronger position. I mean, but from their point of view, they can say it was a successful mission with casualties only to the militants. Certainly killed three people, yeah. Who were terrorists embedded in the hospital. The State Department was pressed on this yesterday. Let's roll some of that.

Something that you think is problematic or is it something that you look at with envy? Like this is some kind of great mission, impossible mission that we wish that we could also do? So I'd say that we strongly urge caution whenever operations have the potential to impact civilians and civilian installations. That, of course, includes hospitals. We do recognize the very real security challenges Israel faces and its legitimate right to defend its people and its territory from terrorism. Israel, of course, has the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but those operations need to be conducted in full compliance with

international humanitarian law. Well, do those operations include going into hospitals and murdering people in their beds, regardless of whether they are suspected or even known terrorists. Is that okay with you guys? So there was a lot in the premise of that question. Obviously, we did know that they went in. Well, you don't think they went in and killed people who were completely innocent. So let me say that.

If you did think that, then you would be condemning it, right? We certainly would, but I would say that Israel has said that these were Hamas operatives. They have said that one of them was carrying a gun at the time of the operation. So I'm not able to speak to the facts of the operation. You'd have to pass some kind of legal judgment, know all of the facts of the operation. But as a general matter, they do have the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but they need to be conducted in full. Including in a hospital. So we want them to conduct their operations in compliance with international humanitarian law. We would generally say that we don't want them

to carry out operations in hospitals, but under international humanitarian law, hospitals do lose some of their protections if they are being used for the planning of terrorist operations, for the execution of terrorist operations. The actual hospital building does, but I mean, going in disguised as women and doctors and whatever is something different. And then going in and picking out people in particular rooms or beds and killing them seems to be something different. It is a great line of questioning that pushes the State Department for consistency little bit more about the rules-based order that the

United States and Israel are sort of talking about all of the time as it applies to Hamas and as it applies to operations in Palestine and elsewhere? Where is this or what is that context on the other end? Yeah, Hamas is a guerrilla army. And so Israel is routinely accusing it of embedding itself among a civilian population. Which was the case here. It's an interesting question. If a terrorist is going for treatment at a hospital, does that count as kind of hiding among the civilian population or does that count as like they needed treatment? Yeah, I suppose we don't know exactly what the case is. We don't know exactly what they were doing in the hospital.

We can tell that one of them was lying on the bed because the blood stain and the bullet hole goes right through the pillow. Right. So somebody was hurt enough that they're in bed and getting treatment. And it has been said that they were getting treatment, and that's how they knew that they were in there. So Alon Levy, who's the Israeli spokesperson, was in a Twitter fight with Yanis Varoufakis, who is the former Greek finance minister who was accusing him of breaking the rule of law. Varoufakis said, here's the latest incident.

Israeli undercover soldiers agents entered Jenin Hospital this morning and shot dead 300 Palestinians in their hospital beds while being treated rule of law, Western style, want to talk about terrorism. Alon Levy responded, Israel eliminated three terrorists trying to hide in a hospital and then dug up their ancestors in a weird way. He says, I bet when this man's ancestors accused Jews of the original medieval blood libels, they also felt similarly smug and morally superior, but at least their excuse was that they were illiterate. Speaking of propaganda battles, I don't see who he's winning over there. versus like Netanyahu, where if you have a problem as the United States, like if you have a problem

with the rule of law, the rule-based international order, say that. Don't pretend to be upholding the rules-based order when you can't answer questions, which was the case with Matt Miller there. I mean, it would make so much more sense to say, well, we think that this particular rule against war crimes is wrong, that this doesn't make sense. It's impossible when you're fighting a guerrilla operation, as you were saying, Ryan. a way, in one way, and then having your propaganda battle be all about rules-based international order when you get into a sort of conversation like that and don't have clear answers. Again, honesty and war, these are questions that have puzzled people for time immemorial. But in this case, it's just very grating to hear the constant, you know,

propaganda about the rules-based international order. And to follow up on a story that we covered last week, Israel was under fire for desecration of cemeteries across Gaza. Their initial rationale, they said, for desecrating these cemeteries was that they were trying to kind of dig up graves and find the remains of hostages. The new explanation that they have is that there were actually tunnels underneath these cemeteries that they were working to destroy. CNN was the one that the Western media, the American media, that exposed this last week because there was a CNN embed with them as they were destroying all these cemeteries. Now they're following up again.

And there's a this is a fascinating story from CNN. And watch to the end of it here. Let's roll that. We're asking the general if we can actually see the shaft to the tunnel. But the answer is no. So? There's all kinds of machinery which I don't want you to, just to take pictures of.

The security might force it. What about if we don't film it? We just look with our eyes? You might fall in. The whole thing can collapse. You have to walk to the edge. The edge is not secured. It can collapse.

There's machinery and so on. It's not something I'm going to take a risk on. Sorry. The Israeli military later provided this drone footage showing the tunnel shaft we entered and another one nearby. CNN geolocated the footage using this satellite image. This outline shows where the cemetery once stood, and these are the two tunnel entrances clearly outside the graveyard. As for the tunnel they say they found here, where the cemetery once stood,

the military never provided any evidence. And so, yeah, if you're watching it, it's, if you're listening to it rather than watching it, yeah, the images were outside of the cemetery. And, you know, good for CNN for, usually CNN there would say, CNN could not independently verify the Israeli officials' claim. Here, they said they provided no evidence, while also showing that the evidence they did provide was a lie, that it was outside the cemetery. I would say that this is suggestive of the Western media taking a little bit of a turn. But in fact, the Western media has spent the last several days just talking about the 12 alleged Hamas terrorists, or 10 of them Hamas, one Islamic Jihad, one apparently a civilian that ran over, who worked for UNRWA, which has led to the pausing of funding by the U.S. and like a dozen other countries to the refugee agency. And the leaked messages from underwater.

Which we'll talk about in a minute, yeah. Right. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them.

From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billiondollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st

and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

I've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more.

Brought to you by AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. The Intercept has some excellent reporting on internal turmoil at the New York Times over an episode of their extremely popular podcast, The Daily, which is a source of news for people around the country, a primary source of news, actually, for people around the country. It also airs on NPR. Now, Ryan, tell us a little bit about what you guys found when you looked into these internal conversations at The New York Times. Yeah, and I think the context here is that The New York Times has been so successful at navigating the transition to digital media, And so much of the rest of the mainstream media has been so bad at navigating that transition

that the Times now has almost a dangerous concentration of power among kind of liberal audiences. A major story in the New York Times and an episode of the Daily can by itself establish a narrative. It doesn't even need what the New York Times also has, which is a megaphone capacity And an episode of The Daily can by itself establish a narrative. It doesn't even need what The New York Times also has, which is a megaphone capacity where they do reporting and then it's picked up on by CNN and MSNBC, ABC News, the rest of it. And so it disseminates that way just on its own. It now has the capacity to kind of shape millions of people's understanding of how they ought to think about

the world and what they understand has happened. And oftentimes, based on the reporting that we've done about the New York Times newsroom, this massive world-changing decisions are made in seconds by kind of mid-level editors just plucking something off of the New York Times internal slack, turning it into a headline that then becomes a controversy for like three days. It's like, why did the reporter put this in slack? I grabbed it and made it a headline. Why is the world kind of freaking out? And so the piece that we have up on The Intercept that I did with my colleague Daniel Boguslaw, which you can put up here, is about how the Times at the end of December did a major piece called Screams Without Words about Hamas using sexual violence as a weapon of war on October 7th, systematically

using it. Inside the New York Times, a ton of reporters and editors kind of pushed back and said, you have to be very careful with this story because it does not seem to stand up its main claim. Was there sexual violence on October 7th? Absolutely. Can you claim that it was systematic and perpetuated by Hamas deliberately based on what is in this reporting. And a lot of reporters and editors are pushing back saying, no, you can't. You can't make those claims. And that's really interesting that you have the reporters and editors at The New York Times pushing back on what The New York Times— And the reporters are themselves saying that they're confident that there was sexual violence.

Yes. But they're saying this story itself does not stand up for a variety of different reasons that are was sexual violence. Yes. But they're saying this story itself does not stand up for a variety of different reasons that are out there publicly. And the Times was promoting this story. I mean, this was a big spread. This was a huge story for them. And it makes sense then they wanted to jump into The Daily, that they wanted to take it and feature it as a center for an episode of The Daily. And that's where the staff pushback became untenable, according to your reporting here, right? Right. It was scheduled to air in early January,

about a week and a half after the original story came out. But under pressure, producers and fact-checkers with The Daily started looking closer at the story and they put it on ice. And we're now into, you know, tomorrow will be February and it hasn't run yet. And we may still see an episode of it. But what we learned was that the original script, which shewed very closely to the original New York Times story, which had a lot of certainty and was sourced to a lot of people,

you know, who have changed their stories and have said, like, just completely wild things that have been, you know, publicly discredited. Like, one person, I think, said that there was, that they found a pregnant woman who'd had a, like, a fetus cut out of her. And the Israeli government itself, like, debunked a lot of these claims. So the same people who the Israeli government have backed away from were like the names, were a lot of named sources for the New York Times here. So. And what was the problem for this story in particular is when one of the family members who spoke to the New York Times. A family member came out. Publicly said that this reporter, which you guys get into Joe Kahn and his background as sort of an advocate for the state of Israel politically, his father as well, which is very interesting

context. I think it doesn't mean that his reporting can't be completely accurate and honest, but it does add some context here to what happened. But when you have a family member saying, that's not what I thought I was telling the reporter, it was pretty devastating for the story itself. Yes, and other issues that have been raised elsewhere. And so the Daily wrote a new script, which was much more kind of open-ended and asking questions. And it was what, from people that I've spoken with who are familiar with it, a much more responsible piece of journalism and approached the approach the issue in a much more sensitive way but that hasn't aired yet and because the times is in a bit of a jam because if they run the original One the original script then they're kind of republishing a lot of errors that have since been exposed

If they run a more circumspect kind of dialed down responsible version that raises all of these questions. It's a concession. About, well, why haven't you corrected the original one? Are you backing off of the original one? So for the reporters involved here, the only way out is through. And so they were assigned a news story. And that came out earlier this week. One of the most bizarre pieces I've seen in the New York Times, because the headline was about the United Nations sending investigators over to Israel to examine atrocity allegations. But after just a couple of paragraphs, it turns into kind of a re-reporting and an interrogation of the original story.

Yet it was written by the same reporters. I've never seen a group of reporters assigned to go question their own reporting. Unsurprisingly, they checked their own work and found it to be solid. Although one of their sources won't talk to them anymore. It's a fascinating piece. People can check it out. But it shows, it just is a glimpse into the kind of war over the messaging related to this conflict because so much of the justification for the ongoing onslaught is rooted on the barbarity of October 7th. And it feels like the actual barbarity that was on display for everyone to see didn't seem to be enough for some propagandists that they had to like ratchet it up. And you start seeing things like 40 beheaded babies and on and on.

The things that are just were not true. But by the time we realize that they're not true, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed based on, you know, justifying their killing based on things that we then learned didn't happen. So this next element involves the Wall Street Journal. We'll put this up on the screen. So this is the Wall Street Journal. Intelligence reveals details of UN agency staff's links to October 7th. The subhead is around 10% of Palestinian aid agencies. 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants, according to an intelligence dossier.

This next part of the element you can see is on the right side of the screen, that's the author of the story, who is, again, this is the author of the story served in the IDF. So you can understand the intelligence dossier finding its way to a former IDF member who's writing for the Wall Street Journal, Ryan. Again, helpful context. I think it's interesting if you try to imagine that you're a Palestinian reading the Western press. And you're like, what the hell is this? And it's just, you see all of these people who served in the IDF or whose children are currently serving in the IDF doing the reporting.

It's not like, you can only imagine if there were a reverse situation. Like you simply can't, actually, you simply cannot imagine if there were a reverse situation. Like you simply can't, actually you simply cannot imagine if there was a reverse situation. Well, there were allegations of some, especially like freelancers who got, you know, early reporting footage. Yes, that's a very good point. And Israel said they were going to kill those people. Yes. Yes. Right, right.

Because they were journalists who were photographing October 7th. There were a couple of allegations that did seem like the journalists in the interest of access would be the most charitable version of that argument did have links to Hamas. and the military population in a tiny swath of land like Gaza that creates very real challenges for Israel morally and creates like a really difficult situation. And that's no excuse. I don't say that as an excuse whatsoever. I'm just saying the situation on the ground is not like in other wars. It's not the same thing. It's a different thing. And that's something that, you know, with this media coverage, it's tough because it's, again, I think people with biases can do perfectly good reporting. Sure. Like me. And I think that's a huge problem when you're, and I'm sure we agree on that point, that when you're not upfront and open about the fact that you served in the IDF, you are totally pro-Zionist, you are all of these different things, fine. But being open about that, I think would help people say, oh, this intelligence dossier

you're reporting on. And I think UNRWA does have really real problems. We can put this Jeremy Scahill tweet up on the screen as well. In the same way I was just talking about, this is Jeremy Scahill saying, incredible, quote, we haven't had the ability to investigate the allegations ourselves. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said of Israel's charges against UNRWA employees, Blinken then adds, but they're highly, highly credible. That I imagine is about the dossier specifically. But in general, there was also reports from an open Israeli advocacy group, UN Watch, that leaked a bunch of messages from UNRWA workers after October 7th, seeming to celebrate what had happened. And again, this is what we're talking about,

the challenges of having Western media with a lot of people who maybe fought in the IDF, uh, whose parents fought in the IDF, and then having the task of reporting on all of this. Um, it's just a completely different situation. Yes. And the, the, the 10% figure, uh, I think should be taken with a grain of salt there where they say that 10% have connections to militants. That's in the subhead. In the actual article, it says connections to either the political or social wing. Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza. And so I think 15% of the population is like an actual member. So how, I mean, 10% sounds like a vast undercount. If anything.

You would think it might be. And then they say that they have a close, half have a close relative or something that's involved with Hamas. So what does that tell you? Most people have hundreds of relatives because the birth rates there are through the roof and people can't leave. So within just two generations, you've got 300 cousins living in the same neighborhood. If one of them is involved with Hamas, which is the government of the area, then boom, of the 13,000 or so employees inside Gaza of UNRWA, then you hit a number like that. Which makes it really hard, again, to prosecute a war while talking about the

rules-based international order and then having this massive level of civilian and military entwinement as these stories demonstrate without committing some really egregious violations. Israel made a mistake by propping up Hamas. Absolutely. Israel allowed, you know, insisted actually that Qatar continue to prop up Hamas so that they would not have a partner for peace. They wanted to divide. Netanyahu was very clear about this. They wanted to divide the Palestinians between the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank, Hamas running Gaza. Forty chess. Because then Netanyahu would not be under any pressure to negotiate with Palestinians towards statehood, because Hamas doesn't want to negotiate towards statehood.

So they both had an incentive to keep each other in power. And one thing that frustrates me about some on the left and in the supporters of the resistance who say, who are supportive of not necessarily Hamas, but like you'll find them defensive about Hamas. Like, why are you defending an organization that Netanyahu wants in power? Like, come on. Netanyahu's points. Like, why are you, yeah, being a sucker for Netanyahu's pawns. Why are you being a sucker for Netanyahu here? Take Netanyahu at his word. They are an obstacle to dignity and to a resolution of this conflict.

And take Palestinians at their word because a whole lot of Palestinians hold that exact same perspective and say, yeah, Netanyahu's right. Hamas is an obstacle. But if you back Palestinians into a corner and don't give them any other options, then they're like, well, thisanyahu's right. Hamas is an obstacle to... But if you back Palestinians into a corner and don't give them any other options, then they're like, well, this is what we've got. We tried 30 years of the peace process, and every single year, conditions materially and civilly got worse. The underlying tension we talked about earlier in the show, where you have the United States and Israel on vastly different pages about a one-state solution or a two-state solution while spending, from the U.S. perspective, billions every year in this region and now so much more on the line.

It is just a quagmire. There's no other way to put it. And there's basically no light at the end of that tunnel. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated

itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st. And episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more.

Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. Let's move on to the squad, Ryan, because this is in some ways a more interesting, not more interesting, a more lighter story because we have poetry from Jamal Bowman involved. We have mistranslations involved and we have, I guess, security turned husbands involved in all likelihood. Ryan, what is the name of your book, by the way? The book is called The Squad and it's going to need, the paperback version is going to need another chapter for everything we're seeing. Just this week. Yeah. The context, of course, is that, you know, AIPAC is putting together an unprecedented level of spending to try to wipe out the squad in Congress. Meanwhile, they're facing a cascading number of their own scandals that we'll talk about. Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman and Ilhan Omar in this segment.

Let's start with Cori Bush. It was reported yesterday that she's under DOJ investigation for over her campaign spending on security. After the news was broken by a punch bull, she came out and acknowledged that the investigation is happening and said that she will be found to have done nothing wrong. Let's roll a little bit of Cori Bush here. I hold myself, my campaign, and my position to the highest levels of integrity. I also believe in transparency, which is why I can confirm that the Department of Justice is reviewing my campaign spending on security services. We are fully cooperating with this investigation, and I would like to take this opportunity to outline the facts and the truth.

Since before I was sworn into office, I have endured relentless threats to my physical safety and life. As a rank-and-file member of Congress, I am not entitled to personal protection by the House and instead have used campaign funds as permissible to retain security services. I have not used any federal tax dollars for personal security services. Any reporting that I have used funds for personal security is simply false. In recent months, right-wing organizations have lodged baseless complaints against me, peddling notions that I have misused campaign funds

to pay for personal security services. That simply is not true. So Emily, what's the best case that you've seen in the right-wing press kind of against her at this point? Well, it does look like there was, so this can go in a couple of different ways. So from her perspective, she can say, I need to spend a lot of money on security. She had a security guard who turned into her husband, who she says was making fair market rate. And, you know, it looks like she's expensive, so it's probably going to be a high-popping number. But go ahead. Yeah, so she spends more than other people do on security.

And, okay, but she can make the point that she's a member of the squad. The squad is very high profile. And that necessarily means she's probably going to be spending more money on security than other, your sort of run-of-the-mill member of Congress for being a member of the squad who has sort of an ideologically highile departure from the political establishment in Washington, DC. So you can see how that argument in and of itself can go both ways. She's spending a lot of money on security.

Maybe it's because she was involved with her husband and paying him more than fair market rate. We'll see. I mean, that's what they're investigating. I think it's a perfectly legitimate investigation. I'm glad that she's cooperating with it. We will see how it turns out. She was previously investigated by the Office of Congressional Ethics. Currently, they're both investigating. I thought that one concluded, well, she said that they concluded that she had followed the rules. She says that the House Committee on Ethics are currently reviewing the matter.

Yesterday, she said that. Okay. Because previously, she'd been reviewed, and they had found that she was okay. Maybe now with the new news, they're taking a closer look into it, because the DOJ would have access to more information than OCE would. And you know that the House Ethics Committee is so—you never really know when their timelines, they're very secretive. They're totally closed off. So maybe there was something else that they were investigating that Cori Bush was aware of, that is what she's referring to there. So again, I mean, we'll see. I don't think we have

conclusive evidence in any direction. I'm glad they're investigating it, but this is just so minor. I mean, it's just, it is, the allegations are- We're talking about war and peace. Yes. And then we're going to have a race determined. Like for members of Congress, I'm saying this as a conservative, like this is not disqualifying whatsoever for members of Congress. Now, the right has made a lot of her being a sort of defund the police person

and a lot of the squad being defund the police people and then paying higher. That's a clean hit. I think that's what I was just going to say. That's a much cleaner hit. So we'll see where this goes. But again, she does have a primary challenge, right? That's being funded by APAC. There's a lot. He, yes. What's his name, Wesley Bell was running for Senate, jumped out of the Senate race and into the House race after October 7th when it appeared that Bush could be vulnerable to a well-financed challenger. He announced he had raised $600,000. AIPAC has already been spending spending. APAC was spending against her

before she had an opponent through its super PAC. So yes, they're absolutely coming for her. So this will wind up, I think, in all of the super PAC ads. Marie Newman, who APAC took out in 2022 because she represented a huge kind of Palestinian population in Illinois, had a congressional ethics review underway. And they made that like the focus of their massive spending against her. So if you have 30 seconds to do an ad and you got a million dollars to spread it, you can make someone look really, really bad. We'll see whether or not people kind of believe it.

And also, you know, maybe they actually, we'll see. Everyone's innocent until proven guilty. Maybe they did make some mistakes in how they did this. Mistakes or intentional, you know, funneling of money. But again, this is so, members of Congress commit so many egregious ethical violations. I say this not, I completely think that they should be looking into it. If there's good journalism in this space, I welcome it.

And I welcome the ethics investigation. I'm glad she's fully cooperating. Again, this is just not on the same level as other congressional acts. And there's an interesting class issue here in the sense that Bush was in poverty up until she got her first paycheck, basically, as a member of Congress. She's been homeless. And wealthy members of Congress—yeah, right, she was in and out of homelessness. Wealthy members of Congress find ways to get fantastically rich through their quote-unquote public service, and their consultants find ways to buy boats with campaign money. And they just happen to know the precise legal ways that they're able to get insanely rich. I'm sure much richer and many more boats

than the people who are alleged to have taken a little extra security money for allegedly not doing enough security work. And as Sam Godoldig outlined here just a couple of weeks ago, and his firm outlined here just a couple of weeks ago, the Squad and the Freedom Caucus represent some of the lowest income districts in the country, whereas the more centrist represent the higher income districts in the country. And so, yes, you see the class issues, I think, play out in different questions like these, which is a good prism to look at them through. We should move on to Ilhan Omar. Number two in the barrel. Yes, we're continuing our tour through the scandals of the squad and this last week of January 2024 with this video

of Ilhan Omar. This is a VO so we can start running it because she's speaking a different language. She says, my answer to Somalians was, and she's speaking to Somalians, that the U.S. government will only do, they will not do what we want and nothing else. They must follow. We Somalians must have that confidence in ourselves that we call for. We live in the U.S., pay taxes in the U.S., and have a real voice. The U.S. is a country where one of your daughters is in Congress to represent your interests. For as long as I'm there, basically, Somalia will never be in danger. Its waters will not be stolen by Ethiopia or others. The U.S. would not dare to support anyone against Somalia to steal our land,

sleep in comfort, knowing I'm here to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the U.S. system. So that's translation that was on the bottom of the video. She's speaking to her constituents in Minnesota that are of Somalian heritage. Right. And so there's a fight over exactly what she said because she was- The words I just read, actually. Whether or not those are accurate translation of what she just said is at the heart of this. And so she was speaking in Somali. And so a couple of Somali analysts have posted their own translations of what they say that she said. And Omar reposted one of those. So I think that's a fair one to go by. And in the Spectator article, they quote, and it's also on Twitter, you know, she said,

quote, while I am in Congress, no one will take Somalia's sea. Somalia belongs to all Somalis. Somalia is one. We are brothers and sisters and our land will not be balkanized. Our lands were taken from us before. And God willing, we may one day seek them. So what that is a reference to is on January 1st, the Ethiopia basically cut a deal with the breakaway republic, unrecognized breakaway republic of Somaliland, where Ethiopia would recognize Somaliland,

which broke away from Somalia. And in exchange, Ethiopia would get access to roughly 20 kilometers of sea because Ethiopia has been landlocked forever or for decades. And it is a source of kind of domestic, you know, forever and or for decades. And it is a source of kind of domestic, you know, a national shame that they don't have. And they also have claimed quite reasonably that it holds back economic growth and not have not be able to build a port city. So they cut a deal.

This is an MOU between Ethiopia and Somaliland. Somalia does not recognize Somaliland and believes that it will retake Somaliland at some point. And so it's deeply hostile. We could see a hot war at some point. Deeply hostile to this MOU, this agreement between Somaliland and Ethiopia. And so here, Omar is taking sides in that question saying, no, we're, you know, the U.S. is not going to recognize this MOU. They're not going to recognize Somaliland. And we as a Somali American population are going to exert our lobbying influence here in the U.S. to make sure that they don't do that. Now, she's getting criticized. We can put up this next element.

She's getting criticized for engaging in kind of what people call kind of greater Somalia ideology, and if you look at this kind of map that we have up, and if you're only listening on the podcast, the blue is kind of creeping into Kenya and creeping into Ethiopia, creeping, you know, and obviously taking back Somaliland up close to Djibouti there. That's the kind of the, this like grand vision that some people think she was making a reference to when they say, when she said that our lands were taken from us and one day we will get them back. And so you've got Kenyans, Ethiopians in Somaliland. People are like, how about not? We don't do that.

Yeah, I don't know about that. So that's the context of this current controversy. So a lot of people on the right reacted to a translation which now does appear to look like it's a mistranslation. I'm obviously not a language expert here. It was less irredentist and less kind of aggressive than the original translation, but it does still embrace the idea

that nobody's gonna take Somalia's sea. So it is strict opposition to recognition of this MOU. And one of the things the right actually latched onto even more than that in the original translation was Omar referring to herself first as Somali, then as Muslim, and then as American. And that was a mistranslation. It appears that was a mistranslation. Again, I'm not an expert on the language here, but Ilhan Omar herself shared the translation that you just discussed. So she seems to say that's what she was referring to. But that's what really had people on the right saying, deport her. She should be expelled from Congress. She sees herself. I will say that's a real hypocrisy problem when she's talking about

in this, even in the good translation or the better translation for her, talking about our country, our country, our country, when she's referring to Somalia, and then talking about, quote, this country, when she's talking about the United States. Just, it does seem as though, and I think this is perfectly natural for someone who fled their war-torn homeland and loves their native country. I understand it. I think it's a problem for somebody who criticizes the dual loyalty Israel point. And that, I think, speaking of clean hits, I think that's kind of a clean hit. And I'm all for Somali Americans lobbying their government for whatever interest they want to lobby for. One extra piece of context that has people concerned about this is that the greater Somalia ideology is associated most with former Somali President Saeed Barre, who Omar's father was served under as a colonel. Yeah.

And Barry launched a horrific genocide of hundreds of thousands of people. Yes. Awful, awful person. that, any kind of hearkening back to that era, which she's not necessarily doing, but because it's in the context of this greater Somalia, it has people going, wait a minute. It's a little militant in that big context, yeah. Now we move on to Jamal Bowman. Jamal Bowman, a more fun one. Yeah, this one is the more fun one. Let's put Jamal Bowman's poetry. Was it Jewish Insider that broke this? I think it was. It may have been. Yeah. So here's Jamal Bowman's poetry. If you're listening, we'll read it for you. 2001. And he's using the, he's made the stylist's decision to use debt.

Like 10, 15 years ago or something, right? It's 2011. So long time. So he's using slashes. 2001, planes used as missiles target the twin towers later in the day building 7 also collapsed Hmm multiple explosions heard before and during the collapse Hmm and we can go ahead but you just have a blog or something So you think he keeps doing allegedly two other planes the Pentagon Pennsylvania hijacked by terrorists minimal damage done minimal debris found It's pretty every typical 9-1111 trutherism, but the poetry, the vehicle of poetry, and I'd say very contemporary stylistic poetry is particularly interesting in the case of a sitting Congressman, Jamal Bowman. But you made a really good point

before we started that he's a normal guy in ways other members of Congress aren't, which has actually always been my hot take on Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is that as wrong as she is on so many different things, the Beltway is just visceral hatred of her. And their visceral hatred of 9-11 trutherism, for example, which I think has been debunked. I'm sure I'll get comments on that. But for the record, you know, that is so it is so much more in touch with Americans around the country who have no trust and no faith left in any institutions or any government that a lot of people really do believe this because you have given them no reason to trust your side of the story. You know, it's just a, it's kind of a normie thing. Yeah, the late, great Michael Brooks made a great point once where he said

that basically Joe Rogan and that type of person actually represents the real center of America. Like, that's the centrist viewpoint, which is contradictory, confused, distrustful of government. Whereas we kind of think of the New York Times and CNN as the centrist institutions, but they're actually not. They represent a different segment of the population. It's the Rogan types that are right there in the middle.

There's wine mom centrism and Rogan centrism, and they have some Venn diagram overlap, but not a lot. And right. Jamal Bowman is a normal person. Like it was an independent independent before running for Congress. He thinks for himself. And that type of regular person in America is going to fall prey to some of these conspiracy theories. Like, that's going to happen. And so when I saw that, it didn't necessarily shock me. Checks out? Yeah, sure. Yeah. And I think he like in the poem,

maybe commended loose change, which is an Alex Jones documentary. Because Alex Jones sort of started on the left. Yeah, yeah. And that's how he got, that's how he first got famous, right? He was really popular on the sort of like fringe left during the Iraq war because he was questioning like the military industrial

complex so he definitely had a lot of reach. And Loose Change was this YouTube documentary that just had a was just an absolute phenom like millions and millions of people watched it and it has this like you know if you can capture somebody's attention for an hour and you can cherry pick, you know, things. I'm sure people get mad at me, too. The Building 7 people are going to be in our comments. Oh, for sure. But again, that is like one of the big problems here is that our government is not transparent when they always say that they're being transparent.

And we really can't trust what they say. So that's part of the issue is that even when, through good journalism and other sources of primary information and footage, you can put the story together. But again, when the government who you should not trust is telling you, trust us. So Bowman is also facing an APAC-backed challenger, George Latimer, a Westchester County executive. His race could hinge on redistricting. And so this type of thing would be more damaging in some parts of New York than other parts of New York. We'll see how those lines get drawn, who comes out ahead there. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time,

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Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned

one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still

somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives.

Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Let's move on to Maria Salazar down in Miami. Let's take a trip down the coast. Give some credit to this local reporter here.

From New York City to Miami, where Republican Congresswoman Maria Alvaro Salazar was grilled by a local CBS reporter about something that is actually very common here in Washington, D.C. Watch this clip. Last month, you were at FIU and you presented a check for $650,000 to help small businesses at FIU. But you voted against the bill that gave the money that you then signed a check for and handed and had a photo op,

the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, right? You voted against that bill. Right now, you have to give me more details, but I do know that every time I have an opportunity to bring money to my constituents, I do so. I just did $400,000. But look, let's go- But you voted against the Chips and Science Act, right? Listen, right now, I need to ask my staff, what do we look at the 40 million dollars that I have brought to this community? No, I'm you proud of me. I am you proud of the 40 million dollars. But how much but how much that I wrote the Dignity Act.

Haven't I? Let's talk about the America's. Wait, wait, wait. Let me one second. Tell me the money that you talk about, the 40 million dollars that you bring back to the district. Sometimes that money comes from bills that you voted against. You voted against the CHIPS Act, and yet you praise the fact that the South Florida Climate Resilience Tech Hub is going to be started in Miami, right? You voted against the infrastructure bill, and you talk about all the money that comes back to the airport. So at the same time that you're taking

credit for the money that you bring back to the district, in Washington, you're voting against these projects on party line votes. Listen, that was, I think, last cycle. I cannot really remember right now, but just look at the Americas Act, which is what I'm going to vote. So you don't want to explain why you vote against this? I mean, right now, and I'm not trying to be a politician, there's so many bills that I've introduced that I know that many of them I believe. No, no, these are bills that you voted against. That I understand.

But it's, okay, sometimes I vote and sometimes I don't. But let's look at the positive. I'm not trying to be a politician. I also love the line, I need to talk to my staff. I like her body language. She's just leaned back. She's chilled the whole time. She's like, whatever.

Yeah. Sometimes I vote for it, sometimes I don't. Who cares? The money's here. It's well, OK, so there's a lot to bugging me about. Again, like if you weren't watching this, the clip itself, I get this. This was a pretty viral clip. But her body language, right. And you're right. She just doesn't care because actually what a lot of people don't remember about Maria Alvaro Salazar is she had a really successful career as a journalist that she parlayed into her run for Congress. Let's roll some of her and Fidel here. Yeah. So we have this VO. She was one of the few reporters ever to do an on-camera interview with Fidel Castro, one of the few American reporters ever. Like an adversarial, yeah.

Yeah, to do. And she did, yes, a very, and you can see if you're watching, you can see a very young Maria Alvaro Salazar. So Miami 80s there. Yeah, Miami 80s, grilling Fidel Castro. And she's very proud of that interview. I've heard her talk about it before. Fidel, you're taking credit for all this infrastructure spending when you voted against it. I voted against it. Actually, that's very funny. So Rainn, you've been covering this longer than I have. This is the oldest trick in the book, voting against the spending and then later touting it in your district. Republicans did it a ton during Obama's stimulus, too, universally opposed his stimulus. But then, of course, when there's a ribbon cutting, you can't keep a politician away from that because

everybody likes when new stuff gets built. Oh, yeah. There's or there's like that. And again, like actually some politicians have in different cases legitimate arguments here. Not that I agree with the arguments, but what they'll say is with the child tax credit that was passed in the Trump tax bill in 2017, Democrats negotiated on that in the Senate side. And so they might say, you know, I helped get the child tax credit, even though they voted against the bill because they were involved in the backroom negotiations, you know, pushing for the child tax credit. And it's possible that Maria Alvaro Salazar was pushing this pork to get into a bill she knew she would ultimately vote against, just trying to make it.

And this was the excuse a lot during the Obama years, trying to make an inevitable bad bill as good as it possibly can be for your constituents. I think if that was what happened, though, we probably would have heard her use that argument. I love that she's like, I don't know how I voted on that. That was last cycle. That was last cycle. Come on, get out of here. That was last cycle. Don't you want to hear about the bill I've introduced that's going nowhere? Can't we just talk about that? Can't we just talk about that instead? She flipped it around. Aren't you proud of this bill? It's called the America's bill. Are you against the America's bill? Yes. I mean, come on. What's wrong with you? She'll

probably win in a romp, right? I think her original win was pretty close, but once you're in, it's easier to stay in. The other thing is, you know, the— And that area is trending pretty red. She's also very friendly with leadership. So she was kind of elected in a cycle where there were a lot of, like, upstart, Trumpy, MAGA people. And I think she weirdly got lumped in with that because she was anti-socialist, running in a heavily Cuban district. And so she talked a lot about the kind of red meat socialism issue, but she's pretty friendly with leadership and not exactly as red meat as a lot of people would have her, would peg her. And that friendly with leadership part matters a lot in the re-election

part because that determines where some of the money goes. Yeah. She's going to get that $400,000. FIU is going to get that big check. Yeah. Yeah. FIU is going to get that big check. We should see if she'll come on the show and talk to us about that, actually, because she would be an interesting guest. As a former journalist, she knows what she's doing on TV. I'll say that. Yeah. And, you know, Ryan Grimm, Castro, what's the difference, right? There you go. It's a fine line between Ryan Grimm and Fidel Castro. There you go. As I always say. Good writer, right? Fidel? Sure. We'll give him that.

Baseball fan. So, E. Jean Carroll. Gotta see this clip. You love E. Jean Carroll. So, this clip of E. Jean Carroll on MSNBC is worth watching because Donald Trump has $83 million on the line. She was awarded $83 million in damages and a defamation suit. On top of the last defamation. Yes, on top of the last defamation. But she's not the best spokesperson for her own cause. And that has been the case, basically, since she made these allegations against Donald Trump. She kind of went back and forth on whether the allegations constituted rape or not. People will remember that clip. She said, you know, I won't call it rape because there are women down at the border, and I don't want to do a disservice to what other women are experiencing.

She just seems to be eccentric, we'll put it at that. So let's take a look at that eccentricism that was on display in this interview with MSNBC. You've talked about using some of Trump's money that you're about to get to help shore up women's rights. Do you know what that might be, what that might look like? Yes, Rachel. Yes. Tell me. I had such great ideas for all the good I'm going to do with this money. First thing, Rachel, you and I are going to go shopping.

We're going to get completely new wardrobes, new shoes, motorcycle for Crowley, new fishing rod for Robbie. Rachel, what do you want? Penthouse? It's yours, Rachel. Penthouse and France? You want France? You want to go fishing in France? No?

Oh. All right. All right. Okay. That's a joke. That's her lawyer over there saying that's a joke. You heard her lawyer laughing nervously and then tacking on to the end of that answer, quote, that's a joke. Her lawyer was on air with her, which was probably for the best. Do you think she'll actually ever see Trump's money or is he going to figure out ways to not pay? I mean, the more she goes on media, the less opportunity she probably has to get that money because Donald Trump is appealing.

And Donald Trump is appealing the case. And this doesn't help at all. But I mean, if the judgment is affirmed, she could set the money on fire. I mean, actually, it's technically against federal law to burn money. You can't burn money. But she could take Rachel Maddow fishing in France. Like, right? It's not.

Is the appeals court supposed to care what she does with the money? No. I mean, I think in theory, no. But I think does it help people with the credibility question when she says that? I mean, I guess it depends on how much of the media people see. And they deemed her original allegation credible. So that and that, by the way, did, too. Yeah. The jury deemed her original allegation to be credible. And that's how the defamation suit obviously was premised, is that she had a credible allegation.

So what Donald Trump said about the allegation constituted defamation and defamation to the tune of 83-something million dollars. Now, there are also, one of the things that is included in Trump's appeal is that they have the conflict with the judge. Did you see this? So, I'm reading from NBC News here. This is Trump's lawyer, Alina Haba. On Monday, filed a letter with the court in New York, citing a New York Post story that said U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll attorney Robert R. Kaplan, who are not related, had worked at the major law firm Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison in the 1990s. An unidentified former partner at the firm, which employs around 1,000 lawyers, told the Post that Lewis Kaplan had been, quote, like her mentor. And then Haba told the New York Post that the situation was, quote, insane and so incestuous, quote, this is news to us. She told the paper on Saturday, if you're an attorney and you're saying that's news to you this far into a case, probably not great.

Well, Trump doesn't get good attorneys because he doesn't pay them. And so, yeah, you get what you pay for. That's a pretty good way to put it. Yeah, he gets complete hacks who are just willing to work for him on the prayer that he'll somehow pay and on the hope that the exposure will actually help him. You remember for his second impeachment, he had that slip and fall attorney from Philadelphia who just went and winged it on the Senate floor? Mm-hmm. Yeah, he doesn't get the—they're not sending their best, to borrow a phrase. And again, that could be why, actually, if you go through the E. Jean Carroll, so we talked about this a little bit, we don't need to litigate it. She did go back and forth on whether what happened constituted rape.

She has the story about it happening in a busy department store in the middle of the day years ago. But in a dressing room. Yeah, although part of it, I think, was like pinned outside the dressing ago. But in a dressing room. Although part of it, I think, was pinned outside the dressing room and then into the dressing room. It's a, either way. She has gone back and forth on whether it was rape. Trump most hilariously undermined himself

when he likes to go around saying, as if it's a defense against rape, that she's not my type. Yeah. Which bizarrely like concedes the fact that he would happily rape somebody if it was, if they were his type. But then they showed him a picture of E. Jean Carroll and he misidentified her as his wife. Right.

So even his bizarre claim that, you know, he didn't rape her because she wasn't my type fell apart when it's like he he was caught like thinking that it was his wife. It's his wife's not his type. And I mean, again, it's like, does anyone question that Donald Trump not Melania was Ivana was like aggressive with women at the at the very least. No. And that's like, again, it's just these accusations. According to Trump himself. Yes. Yeah, exactly. He will tell you that with some pride. But the accusations themselves are different than that question. But again, jury said they found them credible. So maybe that New York-based jury is just really, really favorable to E. Jean Carroll and Trump has bad lawyers. And maybe that's

how she does end up seeing those $83 million. I don't know, Ryan, that this is the thing that Trump even have $83 liquid million. This is what he sues for like more than anything else. They would have to come out of his campaign money. $83.3 million is a lot of money. And they're just competing reports about Donald Trump's finances, obviously. Right. And Trump, remember, said he was going to work for free as president. And then said he was going to donate his money.

Ended up just pocketing it. It's like the $400,000 salary. So raises questions about how actually liquid he actually is if he needs to, if he actually needed that presidential salary that he claimed he wasn't going to take. Yes. It looks like we do have time to get to the news out of both Pakistan and Venezuela. So yesterday, Matt Miller at the State Department announced that we were snapping back sanctions on Venezuela. So yesterday, Matt Miller at the State Department announced that we were snapping back sanctions on Venezuela. We had relieved sanctions on Venezuela in a negotiation in order to get back some American prisoners that were held there. We wanted them to extradite somebody here.

They extradited that person. And they wanted some other kind of commitments around election transparency, democracy, other reforms. Maduro then claimed that there was a coup attempt against him, arrested a bunch of people, and banned the opposition party heading into an upcoming election. That ban of the opposition party was ratified by the Venezuelan courts, which will become relevant in this segment later. Meanwhile, over in Pakistan, which has an election on February 8th, grassroots members of the PTI, which is the biggest kind of

party, opposition party in Pakistan, are just being arrested en masse when they sign up just to run for lower level offices. And the opposition party leader, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, earlier this week was sentenced to 10 years in a totally bogus case around the alleged mishandling of a classified document that we actually published over at the Intercept. He was not our source. He had nothing to do with it. They never proved he did. It was complete kangaroo nonsense. And then today, they sentenced him to an additional 14 years for another completely ridiculous case. This one is like a state gifts case. So for background, Imran Khan was a famous cricketer, extraordinarily wealthy.

His next phase in his career after cricket was as a philanthropist. That's how he became doubly popular in Pakistan, building hospitals, universities, et cetera. And so then they charged him with taking gifts from like foreign, like say, say Pakistan goes on a, you know, the Pakistan prime minister goes to like Bangladesh and they give him like some gift, like a watch or something. They, they are accusing him of like keeping this stuff illegally. He says he did all the paperwork. The idea that a guy who is massively rich and a philanthropist is trying to pilfer a watch is as absurd as you can imagine.

He's tried in secret. Nothing about the case made any sense. And they're banning him from running for office for 10 years and essentially banning the PTI from the ballot. It's complicated the way that the court did it. The State Department, meanwhile, no sanctions whatsoever. So yesterday at the State Department briefing, there were a lot of questions that were thrown at Matt Miller about this. And

here's how I framed it to him. And here's his response. As you said earlier, that that's a matter for the Pakistani courts. When it came to Venezuela, that's a political matter, it seems. The Venezuelan courts, of course, approved Maduro's banning of the party. Now, you could say that court is under Maduro's thumb. It's a kangaroo court. But in Pakistan, the prosecution was held in secret. Just recently, his attorney, Imran Khan's attorneys were kept out of the courtroom and they took attorneys from the prosecution team and made him and put them on the defense team.

Like nothing about that prosecution seems less than kangaroo. So why would Venezuela's be a political case? But when it comes to Pakistan, that's a matter for the Pakistani courts. So there are different situations and we have not yet made that conclusion with respect to the Pakistani legal process. When you look at Venezuela, we are looking at the entire history of the Maduro regime in cracking down on democracy and, most importantly in this case, failing to carry out the commitments that they made to allow candidates to run. It's a commitment that they made that the country has reneged on, and that's why we were able to make the assessment in that case. So there might still be a determination on the Pakistan question? I just, I don't have

anything to preview, but it's not one that we've made at this time. So Matt Lee, yeah, so Matt Lee, the AP reporter, followed up immediately after this and said, wait a minute. So Venezuela does not have independent courts. But are you saying that Pakistan does? Right. He's like, and he said, my phone's dying here. But if I looked up the State Department's human rights report on Pakistan, would I find that the State Department feels like Pakistani courts are completely independent and trustworthy? What would we do as a country without him in those briefings? I know, it's fun to watch him. I'm glad you're

in there now too. You've started going a lot more. Yeah, it's great to be in there. No, they don't necessarily answer the questions, but you can put things to them and hear how they respond. So if people are actually wondering what the difference is, Venezuela is an adversary. Maduro is an adversary of the United States. And the military-backed government in Pakistan is an ally of the United States. And Imran Khan was seen to be either adversarial or too neutral. And we wanted him to cooperate on weapons production because we were in a hot war with Russia. Yeah, he famously gave this speech to a large rally in response to the EU demanding and the U.S. privately demanding that Pakistan support Ukraine and not take what the U.S. called aggressive neutrality when it came to Ukraine and Russia. He gave a speech where he said, we are not your slaves. And that kind of rhetoric chafes the West. It's like, what are you talking

about? You do what you're told. And now he's in prison. How has October 7th given Imran Khan's relationship with the broader sort of Muslim world and his sort of followers, his base, how has that shifted? How the State Department treats Imran Khan's base and support in Pakistan? Perhaps second to Erdogan, but actually maybe not. Imran Khan was probably the most popular Muslim elected official in the world because Erdogan was not also a famous cricketer on top of everything that Khan did. Don't give him any ideas. And so if Imran Khan were in power now, he would be kind of a loud voice when it came to the Israel-Gaza question. Instead, he's completely muzzled. Just one of the least discussed but most important sort of subplots to the hot wars happening right now in geopolitics.

And we interviewed the Pakistani ambassador over at The Intercept for a podcast, Intercepted and Deconstructed. The Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, UN permanent representative, and we asked him about Israel-Gaza. He actually had served under Khan and serves under the current government. And he was like, look, the Palestinian cause is extremely popular in Pakistan. And I asked him why Pakistan hadn't joined the coalition battling the Houthis. He's like, that would be just completely untenable

for us to do. Like what the Houthis are doing is popular in Pakistan. But the Pakistani government isn't being vocal about any of that. Less aggressive neutrality. Yes, exactly. Passive neutrality. Well, I'm really glad we had time to get to the story. And again, so glad that you're going to those briefings and we get to watch them respond, even when it's a non-answer. A lot of non-answers are super helpful. Should be one later today. I'll be there. All right. We'll be watching for that. And maybe we'll have something to talk about

next week, Ryan, when we're back with CounterPoints in a week from now on Wednesday. Again, remember to subscribe because if you subscribe to the premium version of the show, you get all of CounterPoints right in your inbox. You get it early. You get the full video as opposed to the few videos that are posted to the channel throughout the day on Wednesday. That one's the full show. So if you're a premium subscriber, if you're not a premium subscriber, make sure to do that. We appreciate it so much. It supports the work that we are so privileged to be able to do here. There might still be 25% off. Don't hold me to that. It's a surprise, though. Go check

breakingpoints.com. No, it is. We're told. Yes. Still is 25% off. Go get it quick, though. All right. Well, we'll see you guys back here next week. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there.

Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives.

Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit adoptuskids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7.

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